Poem

Tatsuji Miyoshi

Side by side

After We Were Beaten in War (by Jeffrey Angles)

After we were beaten in war
Ten million babies were born

And that is why the sea is bright blue
And that is why the sky is bright blue

But look! The sun is bright red
As bright and red as blood

Half of the aging twentieth century
Off to the funerary urns, off to urns, off to urns

Crippled crickets wanting to start everything anew
Deep in the forest where all the leaves have fallen

A single swell of a peaceful hill
Beanstalks flowering in a winter garden

What has history recorded?
Clouds come and wipe it all away

A bright blue sky
A bright blue sea

A plane fell there
A battleship sank there

Hearing the whine of artillery
Next to poems from the Man’yōshū

What was it that cast that shadow
In the depths of the woods cut so sparsely?

Yet the sky and sea
Are still bright blue

After we were beaten in war
Ten million babies were born

The Man’yōshū (literally “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”) is Japan’s oldest anthology of poetry, completed in the mid-eighth century CE. It was sponsored by the imperial government and collected many of the earliest known poems produced in the country. These poems have been used for many purposes throughout history, including for the purpose of propaganda during World War II.